Supernatural- "Fixer Upper"
Title: Fixer Upper
Universe: Supernatural
Theme/Topic: Did Sam personally fix the Impala during the season 7/8 gap?
Rating: G
Character/Pairing/s: Sam, mentioned SamxAmelia
Spoilers/Warnings: Through S8E10 to be safe.
Word Count: 3,600
Summary: She’s survived demon attacks and apocalypses, but might not make it through a Texas winter.
Dedication: for janice_lester’s holiday fic request!
A/N: Sam fic? I don’t even know if I can do this, but I figured it was a good opportunity to try! Excuse me if the timeline is all screwed up and if Sam is actually good at cars or something. Details.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
The day the Impala breaks down isn’t special unless you take into account that it’s three weeks to the day before Dean’s birthday. It’s a normal, miserable winter morning in Texas and Sam is in the parking lot of the local mom and pop grocery store when it happens. He’d just tossed a fifteen-pound bag of dog food and a gallon of milk into the backseat while trying not to freeze to death in the interim, because it’s cold and windy out and the parking lot is a mess of cars slowly picking their way through the two inches of dangerous gray sludge on the ground. Apparently Texas snow lives in the gross, slushy, wet side of the snow spectrum and can only dream of one day reaching the clean, powdery white end of it that only happens in small New England towns and on all the classic Christmas movies you start seeing on TV immediately after Thanksgiving. Sam can see his breath misting in front of his face and his fingers are slightly numb as he hastily fumbles the key in the ignition so he can turn on the heater full blast as soon as possible. But when he turns the key, the familiar purr of the Impala’s powerful engine is replaced by a pathetic, metallic whine. It is a decidedly unhappy sounding one.
Sam groans. “No, no, no…” he mutters darkly under his breath, and turns the keys again, more forcefully this time. “C’mon, don’t do this to me.”
The screeching whine from before turns into something more like a hacking cough on his second attempt. The kind that maybe makes it sound like she won’t pull through this one after all, and that Sam is a bastard for trying to make her.
After several more failures to start the car in much this manner, Sam eventually gives up and rests his head against the steering wheel, telling himself to breath deep so he doesn’t lose it and start screaming in the parking lot. This is not what he needs in his life right now. In fact, this is the exact opposite of what he needs, which always seems to happen to him, especially when things are just starting to feel like they might be okay again. His life is a vicious circle of thinking everything is going pretty well and then losing someone or something important in an unexpected twist of fate.
After a minute of sitting in the car with his teeth chattering and his heart hammering, he sighs, sits up, and gropes around his pockets in search of his phone. At least the story of his life means he has a lot of practice forcing himself to put one foot in front of the other again, no matter how much he might want to curl up at any one moment and tell the world to go to hell.
When Amelia picks up two rings later, she very patiently takes the underlying tone of life-or-death panic in his voice in stride and tells him she’ll be out to meet him in fifteen minutes. “Go inside and stay warm,” she says soothingly.
Sam mumbles, “Yeah, okay,” and hangs up with his pulse pounding in his ears. The thought of going inside right now feels a lot like leaving the last member of his family to die alone in the street.
Eventually he heaves one final, shaky breath and starts to move, leaving the milk in the backseat because it’s cold enough out that it’ll keep. He trudges back through the freezing rain and through the sliding glass doors of the grocery, where he asks the little old lady behind the cash register for the number of the nearest mechanic.
Amelia shows up exactly fifteen minutes later with Riot in tow and shakes her head at him when she finds him huddled up in a corner near the customer service counter, sipping bad coffee and looking lost. “You okay?” she asks, with a calming sort of lightness.
“Cold,” Sam admits around a tiny smile. Riot shakes out his coat with a displeased chuffing sound and the three of them gather close around one another for the next half hour, staring out of the grocery store’s slightly foggy windows while waiting for the tow truck to arrive.
Sam realizes that when they’re standing next to him like that it doesn’t feel as bad anymore. It’s still terrible, but not nearly as bad as when he’d been alone.
Wordlessly, he grabs Amelia’s hand and curls his around it.
~~~~~
Sam doesn’t like the mechanic. He’s not sure why, but maybe it’s in part because the mechanic’s name is also Sam, except he’s about a foot shorter than Sam is and looks at the Impala in a completely dispassionate way as she’s rolled into his garage. No one who is going to fix her up has ever looked at her like she means nothing to them before.
“An old car like this isn’t very practical to have around these parts unless you have the wherewithal to tune her up every few weeks yourself, son,” Sam-the-mechanic says blandly, and eyeballs Sam like he doesn’t think Sam is the type to get his hands dirty like that. The worst part is that he’s right.
“She’s a family heirloom,” Sam manages, though the words are sheepish and tinged with regret.
Sam-the-mechanic shrugs nonchalantly and pops the Impala’s hood before he starts to rummage around. Sam suddenly feels inexplicably nauseated at the sight of it, like he had after Cas had dug around in his insides looking for a soul that first time. Amelia senses his discomfort, and maybe Riot does too, because the dog sits back on his haunches and looks at Sam like he’s confused. He whines low in the back of his throat.
“Everything okay?” Amelia asks carefully. She rests her hand on the top of Riot’s head and starts to stroke absently, soothing the dog’s obvious anxiety.
“Yeah,” Sam murmurs. He tries to tell himself that this is ridiculous, that the Impala might have been home before, but now Sam-the-mechanic is right. It’s just a car. A troublesome one at that. Because Sam isn’t Dean and because things change. He’s not a hunter anymore. He has a real place to live, and a real job to do. The Impala is just a car that used to belong to his dad, and then to his brother. Right now, Dad and Dean aren’t here to help make her work again.
There’s just Sam left now, and he doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t know how because after everything, he never really learned how. There had always been someone else to fix it for him. Now it’s Sam-the-mechanic or nothing.
It hits him again for the first time in months then, an abrupt, unexpected punch to the gut that knocks the air out of him as he watches Sam-the-mechanic whistle absently to himself while he putters around the Impala’s insides like it’s just another car, just another paycheck. There is a stranger looking into the depths of the Impala, and this stranger doesn’t get the importance of what he’s doing at all.
Because there’s no one else who understands her - them - now. Sam is the only one left.
His heartbeat ratchets up in his chest and he forces himself to take a steady, even breath even as his vision narrows into a tunnel, focused solely on the car that had been Dean’s, the car that Dean isn’t here to take care of anymore. Amelia’s hand floats from Riot’s head to Sam’s arm like she’s trying to comfort him the exact same way she does with any of the spooked animals that come into her clinic to get treated.
“Sam,” Amelia pushes, a little more firmly than before. The hand on his arm squeezes just a little bit too, tiny and reassuring and strong.
Sam shudders under it. “We have to go,” he says suddenly, turning to her and maybe looking lost enough that how strange he’s acting doesn’t make her question it anymore. Instead, she squeezes his arm again and lets him go, before nodding once, decisively.
“Then let’s go,” she says simply, and gathers Riot’s leash more tightly in her hand. “I’ll call the tow truck again.”
Sam breathes in shaky relief. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and she smiles at him and goes back into the office while Sam clears his throat, taps Sam-the-mechanic on the shoulder, and says, firmly, “Sorry, Sam.”
For a second he’s not sure which one of them he’s talking to.
Sam-the-mechanic pauses mid-whistle to look up at him, bushy eyebrows drawn in question. “Excuse me?” he asks, still tangled up elbow-deep inside the guts of the Impala.
Sam has to fight back his instincts to keep from bodily ripping the guy away from his brother’s car.
He takes another deep, slow, breath instead, and forces something kind of like a smile on his face, though it feels awkward and horrible at best. “I’ve decided,” he manages, voice only shaking a little, “I’m going to try and fix her myself.”
To be honest, he’s not sure whether Dean would approve of the sentiment or be horrified by it. But he does know he has to at least try.
~~~~~
Lately, Sam spends his days opening up various appliances and fixtures over the motel and fixing them, so fixing the Impala can’t be much more difficult than that, theoretically. He and Amelia go to the bookstore in her clunker station wagon that afternoon and he picks out a few manuals on engine repair and one on classical cars. The cashier behind the counter asks him if he wants to join some sort of store club in order to get an additional ten percent off of today’s purchase and any future purchases. Sam gives in and signs up for the card because it makes Amelia smile and take his hand in hers, like joining a frequent buyer club means moving forward for both of them, however small the step may be. They end up adding an extra twenty-five bucks to their total because of it, which really isn’t worth the ten percent discount they get in the end, unless they plan on spending more than two-hundred bucks on books in the next few months.
Sam can hear Dean in his head talking about what a scam the whole idea is and how it’s clearly designed to trick suckers living in po-dunk little suburbs just like this one out of their hard-earned cash.
They drive home in a thoughtful kind of silence after that, and once they get to the house, Sam takes the books to the garage immediately and starts flipping through them, glancing furtively between the diagrams in the book and the Impala herself every once in a while, trying to tell himself that the pictures are simple enough, and the concepts of how a mechanical engine operates are even more simple than that, at least to a guy as smart as he is.
He should be able to handle this just fine on his own.
Amelia ends up having to come drag him out of the garage around midnight, reminding him about work tomorrow, and how he has it and should probably go to it on time in the morning. She takes one look at the books, one of which he’s read cover to cover in the last four hours, and then over to the car, which he still hasn’t touched since the tow truck driver dropped it off in the driveway and helped them push it into the garage. He’s too mortified to make an excuse for himself about his lack of progress.
“I’ll drop you off at the motel tomorrow,” she says eventually, while Riot crowds her feet, impatient to get to bed, where it’s warm and dry.
“Yeah, okay,” Sam says, standing and dusting the backs of his jeans off. He closes the book and stacks them next to the Impala before following Amelia out of the garage.
~~~~~
It takes four more days before he actually pops the Impala’s hood for the first time without Dean there.
He’s still strangely reluctant to do it because it feels like a trespass somehow, but the guilt of having Amelia take him to and from the motel every day weighs on him, particularly because she doesn’t begrudge him the extra twenty minute drive out of her way at all. She doesn’t even mention it, and it starts to eat at him until he tells himself that on his next day off, he’s going to sit down and open the Impala up and figure out what’s wrong.
And so here he is, a man who has faced down the devil himself, standing petrified in the garage of the house he is renting, in front of nothing more devastating than the shell of a broken-down old muscle car.
It somehow feels more intimidating than Lucifer when it’s just him like this, all alone.
The thing that keeps him from turning tail and heading back inside to make himself busy with other chores is the fact that he has Amelia to think about now - Amelia who is alive and here and who shares this house with him - and he cannot, in good conscience, continue to let her drive him to work when it’s out of her way and an enormous hassle.
Part of him longs for the days where he would just steal a car to get around, except he is turning over a new leaf as a functional member of society.
He counts backwards from one hundred in prime numbers before making himself step forward and look under the Impala’s propped-open hood.
Once he starts, once he’s peering down into the metal guts of his brother’s most precious possession, he takes a moment to close his eyes and imagine Dean yelling at him for putting it off this long, for taking horrible care of her. It’s comforting in its own way, and after only a little more hesitation, he finally runs his fingertips tentatively along the cold engine, fingers brushing each bump and curve of the lovingly handled parts scrapped from Bobby’s yard over decades.
Something inside him hums at the thought of that, two parts grief and one part curiosity, wondering if this is what Dean had felt every time he’d peered into the heart of the Impala, thinking about their parents, about what had come before and how he was going to change her now, now that he was in charge.
Sam shakes his head and pulls back just long enough to go and get the books again, because he thinks that if he’s going to do this - and he is, he is - he should go about doing it right. For the sake of everyone who had come before him sure, but then again, also for his own sake and Amelia’s as well.
He has to learn how to do these things by himself now, because Dean isn’t here anymore and Sam is the only one left.
~~~~~
Over the next week he learns more about the inner workings of his family’s car than he had in the previous near thirty years. The Impala, he discovers, is surprisingly accommodating as long as he takes his time to care for her properly. When he rushes though, or when he tries to take any number of the myriad shortcuts his manuals suggest, she can be as stubborn as Dean and twice as uncommunicative.
He learns to take his time. He learns how to talk to and listen to his car, in both a figurative and literal sense. He thinks she likes it when he talks to her.
When Amelia walks into the garage one Saturday morning to find him hard at work and in the middle of a serious conversation with his car about fuel efficiency, she only laughs and asks him if he and the Impala want to order pizza for dinner.
~~~~~
It takes him ten more days and a lot of somewhat costly phone consults with Sam-the-mechanic at the garage in town before Sam finally gets it, before he finally can sit in the driver’s seat again and turn the Impala’s engine on and hear the answering rumbling purr he’s known his whole life. Amelia delights from the garage doorway when it happens, bundled up in a big sweater and sipping peppermint cocoa from a colorful mug while Riot barks because he and the Impala have a contentious relationship at best.
Sam finds himself grinning unexpectedly as the car comes to life around him, the familiar smells and history blending together with the present sights and sounds and scents of this home he’s found, amidst all the things he’s lost. It feels kind of like moving on without forgetting, which is probably the exact opposite of what he’d tried to do with his life before. Maybe this is the healthier version of moving forward, where he can talk about his dead parents and his dead brother with Amelia and not have to think to himself that it’s all his fault.
Before long, Sam is revving the engine lovingly and Amelia has the garage clicker in her hand, pushing the button to open the overhead door while prompting Riot to jump into the backseat. He hops in without a second’s hesitation, before Amelia climbs into the passenger seat next to Sam, mug of cocoa still in hand. Sam thinks about how Dean would balk at both dog and spillable liquids being in his baby at the same time, while Amelia just leans her head happily - obliviously - against Sam’s shoulder and says, “Okay, Sasquatch, let’s see if you really did fix her.”
The cocoa in her wide-rimmed mug sloshes ominously in her hand while she speaks, and Sam side-eyes it for a moment before remembering that the Impala is his now, because he’s the only one left. Dean isn’t here, and he can do what he wants with her. He has to. She’s his.
He backs the Impala out of the driveway carefully while Amelia nestles her mug between her knees so that she can applaud his mechanical prowess properly. She does end up spilling some cocoa on the floor mat under the passenger seat as they drive through town looking at all the holiday lights that have been left up for too long. Amelia giggles in unapologetic delight as Sam pulls onto the street that will lead them to the richer side of the tracks, where the houses are garishly huge and the owners probably shoot trespassers on sight. They do have the best holiday lights out of anyone in town, though.
Before long, the entire cab is filled with the scent of Amelia’s lotion, peppermint chocolate, and slightly damp dog. It’s completely different from the mingled smells of fast food and blood and leather that Sam grew up with in the Impala, but not, he thinks, in a bad way. Just a brand new one.
Once they’re parked outside of an obnoxiously huge ranch-style home that belongs to a retired MLB player and are looking at a nativity scene large enough to encompass most of the obnoxiously sprawling lawn, Sam finally realizes it’s actually Dean’s birthday today, or would have been, if his brother was still here.
Amelia has no idea, and Riot has no idea, and they’re all just staring at the garish Christmas lights and laughing together like this is just a regular part of their regular lives.
Sam figures that even if the day his brother’s car - his car - broke down hadn’t been particularly special, the day she’d chosen to come back to life is strangely, devastatingly perfect.
He wonders if it’s strange that he can think about it like that and still feel like he can breathe.
~~~~~
It will take him a few months to get completely comfortable with opening up the Impala and doing the maintenance she needs to keep running, and even longer than that to start growing confident at it. Even then he’ll be fairly certain that he’ll never be as good as Dad or Dean was at taking care of her, but he’ll tell himself that it doesn’t matter either way because now he’s the only one left who can do it. That means she’s his and his alone now, to do with what he can, to work the kinks out of and keep running along in, even in the coldest, deadest winter night.
For now though, he’s satisfied that he knows how to fix her, at least in the most basic, necessary ways, and for the time being, he thinks that’s all he could ever ask for. He doesn’t have Dean’s maestro’s touch with her insides, and he certainly doesn’t take as fastidious care of her as either his brother or his father did, but he’s improving with time, growing steadily surer and surer of himself, more certain that he can do this, and do it well, so long as he’s allowed to keep trying.
He just has to keep trying.
Amelia is pretty certain he’s the kind of person who can be good at anything he sets his mind to. He’s starting to believe her, and he thinks if that’s the case, he should start working just as hard on this new life he’s been given, the one that’s his and his alone now, simply because he’s the only one left to have it.
With time, and a little effort, he thinks he’s got a chance of becoming pretty good.
END
Universe: Supernatural
Theme/Topic: Did Sam personally fix the Impala during the season 7/8 gap?
Rating: G
Character/Pairing/s: Sam, mentioned SamxAmelia
Spoilers/Warnings: Through S8E10 to be safe.
Word Count: 3,600
Summary: She’s survived demon attacks and apocalypses, but might not make it through a Texas winter.
Dedication: for janice_lester’s holiday fic request!
A/N: Sam fic? I don’t even know if I can do this, but I figured it was a good opportunity to try! Excuse me if the timeline is all screwed up and if Sam is actually good at cars or something. Details.
Disclaimer: No harm or infringement intended.
The day the Impala breaks down isn’t special unless you take into account that it’s three weeks to the day before Dean’s birthday. It’s a normal, miserable winter morning in Texas and Sam is in the parking lot of the local mom and pop grocery store when it happens. He’d just tossed a fifteen-pound bag of dog food and a gallon of milk into the backseat while trying not to freeze to death in the interim, because it’s cold and windy out and the parking lot is a mess of cars slowly picking their way through the two inches of dangerous gray sludge on the ground. Apparently Texas snow lives in the gross, slushy, wet side of the snow spectrum and can only dream of one day reaching the clean, powdery white end of it that only happens in small New England towns and on all the classic Christmas movies you start seeing on TV immediately after Thanksgiving. Sam can see his breath misting in front of his face and his fingers are slightly numb as he hastily fumbles the key in the ignition so he can turn on the heater full blast as soon as possible. But when he turns the key, the familiar purr of the Impala’s powerful engine is replaced by a pathetic, metallic whine. It is a decidedly unhappy sounding one.
Sam groans. “No, no, no…” he mutters darkly under his breath, and turns the keys again, more forcefully this time. “C’mon, don’t do this to me.”
The screeching whine from before turns into something more like a hacking cough on his second attempt. The kind that maybe makes it sound like she won’t pull through this one after all, and that Sam is a bastard for trying to make her.
After several more failures to start the car in much this manner, Sam eventually gives up and rests his head against the steering wheel, telling himself to breath deep so he doesn’t lose it and start screaming in the parking lot. This is not what he needs in his life right now. In fact, this is the exact opposite of what he needs, which always seems to happen to him, especially when things are just starting to feel like they might be okay again. His life is a vicious circle of thinking everything is going pretty well and then losing someone or something important in an unexpected twist of fate.
After a minute of sitting in the car with his teeth chattering and his heart hammering, he sighs, sits up, and gropes around his pockets in search of his phone. At least the story of his life means he has a lot of practice forcing himself to put one foot in front of the other again, no matter how much he might want to curl up at any one moment and tell the world to go to hell.
When Amelia picks up two rings later, she very patiently takes the underlying tone of life-or-death panic in his voice in stride and tells him she’ll be out to meet him in fifteen minutes. “Go inside and stay warm,” she says soothingly.
Sam mumbles, “Yeah, okay,” and hangs up with his pulse pounding in his ears. The thought of going inside right now feels a lot like leaving the last member of his family to die alone in the street.
Eventually he heaves one final, shaky breath and starts to move, leaving the milk in the backseat because it’s cold enough out that it’ll keep. He trudges back through the freezing rain and through the sliding glass doors of the grocery, where he asks the little old lady behind the cash register for the number of the nearest mechanic.
Amelia shows up exactly fifteen minutes later with Riot in tow and shakes her head at him when she finds him huddled up in a corner near the customer service counter, sipping bad coffee and looking lost. “You okay?” she asks, with a calming sort of lightness.
“Cold,” Sam admits around a tiny smile. Riot shakes out his coat with a displeased chuffing sound and the three of them gather close around one another for the next half hour, staring out of the grocery store’s slightly foggy windows while waiting for the tow truck to arrive.
Sam realizes that when they’re standing next to him like that it doesn’t feel as bad anymore. It’s still terrible, but not nearly as bad as when he’d been alone.
Wordlessly, he grabs Amelia’s hand and curls his around it.
~~~~~
Sam doesn’t like the mechanic. He’s not sure why, but maybe it’s in part because the mechanic’s name is also Sam, except he’s about a foot shorter than Sam is and looks at the Impala in a completely dispassionate way as she’s rolled into his garage. No one who is going to fix her up has ever looked at her like she means nothing to them before.
“An old car like this isn’t very practical to have around these parts unless you have the wherewithal to tune her up every few weeks yourself, son,” Sam-the-mechanic says blandly, and eyeballs Sam like he doesn’t think Sam is the type to get his hands dirty like that. The worst part is that he’s right.
“She’s a family heirloom,” Sam manages, though the words are sheepish and tinged with regret.
Sam-the-mechanic shrugs nonchalantly and pops the Impala’s hood before he starts to rummage around. Sam suddenly feels inexplicably nauseated at the sight of it, like he had after Cas had dug around in his insides looking for a soul that first time. Amelia senses his discomfort, and maybe Riot does too, because the dog sits back on his haunches and looks at Sam like he’s confused. He whines low in the back of his throat.
“Everything okay?” Amelia asks carefully. She rests her hand on the top of Riot’s head and starts to stroke absently, soothing the dog’s obvious anxiety.
“Yeah,” Sam murmurs. He tries to tell himself that this is ridiculous, that the Impala might have been home before, but now Sam-the-mechanic is right. It’s just a car. A troublesome one at that. Because Sam isn’t Dean and because things change. He’s not a hunter anymore. He has a real place to live, and a real job to do. The Impala is just a car that used to belong to his dad, and then to his brother. Right now, Dad and Dean aren’t here to help make her work again.
There’s just Sam left now, and he doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t know how because after everything, he never really learned how. There had always been someone else to fix it for him. Now it’s Sam-the-mechanic or nothing.
It hits him again for the first time in months then, an abrupt, unexpected punch to the gut that knocks the air out of him as he watches Sam-the-mechanic whistle absently to himself while he putters around the Impala’s insides like it’s just another car, just another paycheck. There is a stranger looking into the depths of the Impala, and this stranger doesn’t get the importance of what he’s doing at all.
Because there’s no one else who understands her - them - now. Sam is the only one left.
His heartbeat ratchets up in his chest and he forces himself to take a steady, even breath even as his vision narrows into a tunnel, focused solely on the car that had been Dean’s, the car that Dean isn’t here to take care of anymore. Amelia’s hand floats from Riot’s head to Sam’s arm like she’s trying to comfort him the exact same way she does with any of the spooked animals that come into her clinic to get treated.
“Sam,” Amelia pushes, a little more firmly than before. The hand on his arm squeezes just a little bit too, tiny and reassuring and strong.
Sam shudders under it. “We have to go,” he says suddenly, turning to her and maybe looking lost enough that how strange he’s acting doesn’t make her question it anymore. Instead, she squeezes his arm again and lets him go, before nodding once, decisively.
“Then let’s go,” she says simply, and gathers Riot’s leash more tightly in her hand. “I’ll call the tow truck again.”
Sam breathes in shaky relief. “Yeah, okay,” he says, and she smiles at him and goes back into the office while Sam clears his throat, taps Sam-the-mechanic on the shoulder, and says, firmly, “Sorry, Sam.”
For a second he’s not sure which one of them he’s talking to.
Sam-the-mechanic pauses mid-whistle to look up at him, bushy eyebrows drawn in question. “Excuse me?” he asks, still tangled up elbow-deep inside the guts of the Impala.
Sam has to fight back his instincts to keep from bodily ripping the guy away from his brother’s car.
He takes another deep, slow, breath instead, and forces something kind of like a smile on his face, though it feels awkward and horrible at best. “I’ve decided,” he manages, voice only shaking a little, “I’m going to try and fix her myself.”
To be honest, he’s not sure whether Dean would approve of the sentiment or be horrified by it. But he does know he has to at least try.
~~~~~
Lately, Sam spends his days opening up various appliances and fixtures over the motel and fixing them, so fixing the Impala can’t be much more difficult than that, theoretically. He and Amelia go to the bookstore in her clunker station wagon that afternoon and he picks out a few manuals on engine repair and one on classical cars. The cashier behind the counter asks him if he wants to join some sort of store club in order to get an additional ten percent off of today’s purchase and any future purchases. Sam gives in and signs up for the card because it makes Amelia smile and take his hand in hers, like joining a frequent buyer club means moving forward for both of them, however small the step may be. They end up adding an extra twenty-five bucks to their total because of it, which really isn’t worth the ten percent discount they get in the end, unless they plan on spending more than two-hundred bucks on books in the next few months.
Sam can hear Dean in his head talking about what a scam the whole idea is and how it’s clearly designed to trick suckers living in po-dunk little suburbs just like this one out of their hard-earned cash.
They drive home in a thoughtful kind of silence after that, and once they get to the house, Sam takes the books to the garage immediately and starts flipping through them, glancing furtively between the diagrams in the book and the Impala herself every once in a while, trying to tell himself that the pictures are simple enough, and the concepts of how a mechanical engine operates are even more simple than that, at least to a guy as smart as he is.
He should be able to handle this just fine on his own.
Amelia ends up having to come drag him out of the garage around midnight, reminding him about work tomorrow, and how he has it and should probably go to it on time in the morning. She takes one look at the books, one of which he’s read cover to cover in the last four hours, and then over to the car, which he still hasn’t touched since the tow truck driver dropped it off in the driveway and helped them push it into the garage. He’s too mortified to make an excuse for himself about his lack of progress.
“I’ll drop you off at the motel tomorrow,” she says eventually, while Riot crowds her feet, impatient to get to bed, where it’s warm and dry.
“Yeah, okay,” Sam says, standing and dusting the backs of his jeans off. He closes the book and stacks them next to the Impala before following Amelia out of the garage.
~~~~~
It takes four more days before he actually pops the Impala’s hood for the first time without Dean there.
He’s still strangely reluctant to do it because it feels like a trespass somehow, but the guilt of having Amelia take him to and from the motel every day weighs on him, particularly because she doesn’t begrudge him the extra twenty minute drive out of her way at all. She doesn’t even mention it, and it starts to eat at him until he tells himself that on his next day off, he’s going to sit down and open the Impala up and figure out what’s wrong.
And so here he is, a man who has faced down the devil himself, standing petrified in the garage of the house he is renting, in front of nothing more devastating than the shell of a broken-down old muscle car.
It somehow feels more intimidating than Lucifer when it’s just him like this, all alone.
The thing that keeps him from turning tail and heading back inside to make himself busy with other chores is the fact that he has Amelia to think about now - Amelia who is alive and here and who shares this house with him - and he cannot, in good conscience, continue to let her drive him to work when it’s out of her way and an enormous hassle.
Part of him longs for the days where he would just steal a car to get around, except he is turning over a new leaf as a functional member of society.
He counts backwards from one hundred in prime numbers before making himself step forward and look under the Impala’s propped-open hood.
Once he starts, once he’s peering down into the metal guts of his brother’s most precious possession, he takes a moment to close his eyes and imagine Dean yelling at him for putting it off this long, for taking horrible care of her. It’s comforting in its own way, and after only a little more hesitation, he finally runs his fingertips tentatively along the cold engine, fingers brushing each bump and curve of the lovingly handled parts scrapped from Bobby’s yard over decades.
Something inside him hums at the thought of that, two parts grief and one part curiosity, wondering if this is what Dean had felt every time he’d peered into the heart of the Impala, thinking about their parents, about what had come before and how he was going to change her now, now that he was in charge.
Sam shakes his head and pulls back just long enough to go and get the books again, because he thinks that if he’s going to do this - and he is, he is - he should go about doing it right. For the sake of everyone who had come before him sure, but then again, also for his own sake and Amelia’s as well.
He has to learn how to do these things by himself now, because Dean isn’t here anymore and Sam is the only one left.
~~~~~
Over the next week he learns more about the inner workings of his family’s car than he had in the previous near thirty years. The Impala, he discovers, is surprisingly accommodating as long as he takes his time to care for her properly. When he rushes though, or when he tries to take any number of the myriad shortcuts his manuals suggest, she can be as stubborn as Dean and twice as uncommunicative.
He learns to take his time. He learns how to talk to and listen to his car, in both a figurative and literal sense. He thinks she likes it when he talks to her.
When Amelia walks into the garage one Saturday morning to find him hard at work and in the middle of a serious conversation with his car about fuel efficiency, she only laughs and asks him if he and the Impala want to order pizza for dinner.
~~~~~
It takes him ten more days and a lot of somewhat costly phone consults with Sam-the-mechanic at the garage in town before Sam finally gets it, before he finally can sit in the driver’s seat again and turn the Impala’s engine on and hear the answering rumbling purr he’s known his whole life. Amelia delights from the garage doorway when it happens, bundled up in a big sweater and sipping peppermint cocoa from a colorful mug while Riot barks because he and the Impala have a contentious relationship at best.
Sam finds himself grinning unexpectedly as the car comes to life around him, the familiar smells and history blending together with the present sights and sounds and scents of this home he’s found, amidst all the things he’s lost. It feels kind of like moving on without forgetting, which is probably the exact opposite of what he’d tried to do with his life before. Maybe this is the healthier version of moving forward, where he can talk about his dead parents and his dead brother with Amelia and not have to think to himself that it’s all his fault.
Before long, Sam is revving the engine lovingly and Amelia has the garage clicker in her hand, pushing the button to open the overhead door while prompting Riot to jump into the backseat. He hops in without a second’s hesitation, before Amelia climbs into the passenger seat next to Sam, mug of cocoa still in hand. Sam thinks about how Dean would balk at both dog and spillable liquids being in his baby at the same time, while Amelia just leans her head happily - obliviously - against Sam’s shoulder and says, “Okay, Sasquatch, let’s see if you really did fix her.”
The cocoa in her wide-rimmed mug sloshes ominously in her hand while she speaks, and Sam side-eyes it for a moment before remembering that the Impala is his now, because he’s the only one left. Dean isn’t here, and he can do what he wants with her. He has to. She’s his.
He backs the Impala out of the driveway carefully while Amelia nestles her mug between her knees so that she can applaud his mechanical prowess properly. She does end up spilling some cocoa on the floor mat under the passenger seat as they drive through town looking at all the holiday lights that have been left up for too long. Amelia giggles in unapologetic delight as Sam pulls onto the street that will lead them to the richer side of the tracks, where the houses are garishly huge and the owners probably shoot trespassers on sight. They do have the best holiday lights out of anyone in town, though.
Before long, the entire cab is filled with the scent of Amelia’s lotion, peppermint chocolate, and slightly damp dog. It’s completely different from the mingled smells of fast food and blood and leather that Sam grew up with in the Impala, but not, he thinks, in a bad way. Just a brand new one.
Once they’re parked outside of an obnoxiously huge ranch-style home that belongs to a retired MLB player and are looking at a nativity scene large enough to encompass most of the obnoxiously sprawling lawn, Sam finally realizes it’s actually Dean’s birthday today, or would have been, if his brother was still here.
Amelia has no idea, and Riot has no idea, and they’re all just staring at the garish Christmas lights and laughing together like this is just a regular part of their regular lives.
Sam figures that even if the day his brother’s car - his car - broke down hadn’t been particularly special, the day she’d chosen to come back to life is strangely, devastatingly perfect.
He wonders if it’s strange that he can think about it like that and still feel like he can breathe.
~~~~~
It will take him a few months to get completely comfortable with opening up the Impala and doing the maintenance she needs to keep running, and even longer than that to start growing confident at it. Even then he’ll be fairly certain that he’ll never be as good as Dad or Dean was at taking care of her, but he’ll tell himself that it doesn’t matter either way because now he’s the only one left who can do it. That means she’s his and his alone now, to do with what he can, to work the kinks out of and keep running along in, even in the coldest, deadest winter night.
For now though, he’s satisfied that he knows how to fix her, at least in the most basic, necessary ways, and for the time being, he thinks that’s all he could ever ask for. He doesn’t have Dean’s maestro’s touch with her insides, and he certainly doesn’t take as fastidious care of her as either his brother or his father did, but he’s improving with time, growing steadily surer and surer of himself, more certain that he can do this, and do it well, so long as he’s allowed to keep trying.
He just has to keep trying.
Amelia is pretty certain he’s the kind of person who can be good at anything he sets his mind to. He’s starting to believe her, and he thinks if that’s the case, he should start working just as hard on this new life he’s been given, the one that’s his and his alone now, simply because he’s the only one left to have it.
With time, and a little effort, he thinks he’s got a chance of becoming pretty good.
END